Paper quotes

Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra

Dijkstra Algorithm

“What is the shortest way to travel from Rotterdam to Groningen, in general: from given city to given city. It is the algorithm for the shortest path, which I designed in about twenty minutes. One morning I was shopping in Amsterdam with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat down on the café terrace to drink a cup of coffee and I was just thinking about whether I could do this, and I then designed the algorithm for the shortest path. As I said, it was a twenty-minute invention. In fact, it was published in ’59, three years late. The publication is still readable, it is, in fact, quite nice. One of the reasons that it is so nice was that I designed it without pencil and paper. I learned later that one of the advantages of designing without pencil and paper is that you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities. Eventually that algorithm became, to my great amazement, one of the cornerstones of my fame.”

• Source: Dijkstra (2001), in an interview with Philip L. Frana. (OH 330; Communications of the ACM 53(8):41–47)

• See All:
  • Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra_quotes
  • Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra_quotes/Dijkstra_Algorithm

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Keywords: Short_quotes Travel_quotes City_quotes Path_quotes Coffee_quotes Thinking_quotes Algorithm_quotes Invention_quotes Innovation_quotes Publication_quotes Pencil_quotes Paper_quotes Complexity_quotes Fame_quotes Design_quotes Advantage_quotes Amazement_quotes Cornerstone_quotes

Kenneth_W_Kolence

Software Not Physical

“We clearly do not now have an engineering capability comparable to those based on the physical sciences. Such a capability is what is implied by the term software engineering. But software is not a physical system, it is a description of what one describes how a given physical system (a computer of some sort) should act. Thus software is more akin to engineering drawings, either maintained on paper or within a computer. ... So probably it is incorrect to assume software engineering should be considered as a sibling in the family of the physical science based engineering disciplines.”

• Source: Kenneth W. Kolence; Jeffrey Yost (2003). An Interview with Kenneth W. Kolence. Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Technology. Retrieved 2018-03-27 from https://hdl.handle.net/11299/107415 or https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107415/oh348kk.pdf .

• See Also:
  • What Is Software Design? by Jack W. Reeves. Published February 23, 2005)
    • https://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html
    • This essay first appeared in the Fall, 1992 issue of C++ Journal.
  • Kenneth_W_Kolence_quotes
  • Kenneth_W_Kolence_quotes/Software_Not_Physical

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Keywords: Engineering_quotes Capability_quotes Compare_quotes Physical_quotes Science_quotes Software_Engineering_quotes Software_quotes System_quotes Computer_quotes Activity_quotes Drawing_quotes Paper_quotes Sibling_quotes Family_quotes Discipline_quotes Consider_quotes Maintain_quotes Incorrect_quotes